Video potential worry for Obama campaign

The five-year old video showing President Barack Obama talking bluntly about race, Hurricane Katrina and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a source of worry for a campaign that’s already on a knife’s edge over Wednesday night’s high-stakes debate in Denver and thinning leads in national polls.

Obama’s aides and top Democratic officials projected an air of nonchalance and nothing-to-see-here Tuesday night as Fox News and Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller promoted the 2007 speech at Hampton University as a racial rant with the capacity to change the game. But the reelection campaign is concerned especially by the possibility of re-litigating Wright’s role in Obama’s life — a storyline long seen in Obamaland as among the most damaging to the president.

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Obama '07 on Katrina

That’s made even stronger by the new focus on the tape coming at a key moment in the run-up to the debate — timing that could become a distraction for the campaign as the president prepares to take the stage.

The larger threat posed by the video isn’t its content — many of the statements Obama makes have been made by the president or other Democrats — but its capacity to stop the campaign’s accelerating momentum. Taken in combination with several other pre-debate problems for Obama — from tightening polls in Florida and Wisconsin and Vice President Joe Biden’s declaration Tuesday that the middle class has been “buried” over the last four years — the tape could be part of a movement that might make the race not the blowout many pundits have been predicting.

Robert Gibbs, the former White House press secretary, called the video a “distraction,” but added on CBS’s “This Morning,” “If Republicans want to defend the Bush administration’s response to Katrina, I’m sure the president would give them his time during the debate to do that.”

And sources inside the campaign tell POLITICO that they believe Carlson — and the Drudge Report — risked a backlash by emphasizing Obama’s use of church-pulpit African-American cadence. One top Democrat called that a “gift from our enemies.”

The video promoted by several conservative outlets was of then-Sen. Obama addressing a crowd at historically black Hampton University in Virginia in 2007. In it, Obama’s speaking style is markedly different as he spoke bluntly about race, Wright and the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

The Romney campaign said Tuesday that it played no role in distributing the video, which has shifted the focus of an important news cycle thanks to Drudge’s hypnotic command over much of the national media. And unlike after the last Drudge video leak – a 1998 clip of Obama saying he is for the redistribution of wealth that Drudge unearthed in September – Romney didn’t himself appear on Fox News to talk about the video.

Romney is seeking to draw a bright-line contrast with the president on tonight’s debate stage and the distracting, Drudge- and Hannity-promoted video doesn’t help that goal.

To that end, his team spent Wednesday touting the latest misstatement from Vice President Joe Biden, even selling $30 T-shirts with Biden’s face and his Tuesday quotation that the middle class “has been buried the last four years” over an all-caps “honest Joe” flag.

Readers' Comments (247)

Is this a joke of some sort, or are you guys at POLITICO so desperately busy trying to gin up a controversy that you forgot to check in with each other? I just came here from a POLITICO article by Dylan Byers proclaiming the video a dud.

I see Politico is still stuck in the old days, when you could just check the Drudge Report fifteen times a day and assume whatever he was reporting would drive the conversation. Glenn, Reid, Alexander: why would a video that you yourselves say reveals nothing new or game-changing, which is only significant to those members of the far right who are horrified at the notion of a black man "talking black", have any effect on the current momentum of the campaign? Especially when the debate is going to dominate the news coverage for the rest of the week? Come on, guys, you're embarrassing yourselves.

The thing that really amazes me about all this is... it took THREE of you idiots to write this story? Really? That's like having 3 people to screw in a lightbulb... or like Mitt would put it: 3 wives to cook one spaghetti dinner. We all know that Barack Hussein Obama is one angry negro who hates his mother and grandparents. But seriously... 3 people?

This Obama video is not just about President Obama. It is a dramatic example of how the pro-Obama media coddles President Obama, sanitizes his messages, and ignores anything that showcases Obama's flaws and failures. Anything that has the potential to negatively affect Obama's opponents is overhyped and exaggerated.

Really! Why 'worry' President Obama everyone in America is already hip to the repuks play-book of BS, drama and more BS. That was 2007 this is 2012 and frankly my President has done alot to help ME and millions of other American's like me. Soooooooooooooooooooooooo, even the hateful repuks can't lay claim to helping anyone in America but those TRIFLIN 1%.

First of all only about 10 minutes was known to most in the "media" Second, the transcript from that night was of the speech he was supposed to give. Not his personal thoughts. You see, when Obama tells you what he really thinks, he shows his true COLORS...Liberal/Sicialist/Communist. His diatribes about Katrina, etc his "shout-out to the Rev. & various other comments (30minutes worth) were not in the transcript or original video. So, unless YOU were there YOU & most of the 300million Americans did not know what transpired

Please don't make me laugh. The American "media" does not know how to dig. If they did, Obama never would have gotten this far. His friend blew up the Pentagon & NY Police HQ. You know, Bill Ayres. With friends like that, Obama couldn't even get a clearnce level at a real job

Simply put, you can't watch this video without coming to the conclusion that Obama is purposely trying to sew racial division. This is abhorrent, shameful, and incredibly sad.

I suggest everyone watch the video for themselves rather than listening to the very media who whitewashed its contents in the first place when they ran with the Obama team's provided transcript rather than the actual verbatim transcript of the speech.